After more than half a decade in the making, ARM server chips should have struck gold by now, but they haven't. ARM servers were projected to be approaching a double-digit server market share, but they still are virtually non-existent.

At its Windows Hardware Engineering (WinHEC) conference in Shenzhen, China, Microsoft said Thursday morning that it's partnered with Qualcomm to enable new, low-cost PCs. These are intended to replace Windows tablets built around Intel's Atom, a chip the company's essentially discontinued.

Foxconn Technology, which manufactures Apple's iPhone and other products, said it is in talks to expand in the US. The statement comes amid President-elect Donald Trump's push for a return of manufacturing to the US.

China's National Silicon Industry Group, a state-backed semiconductor investment fund, is interested in acquiring a majority stake in German silicon-wafer maker Siltronic, the latest potential Chinese takeover that could face political opposition, according to people familiar with the matter.

In the latest signal from Washington that it's protecting its semiconductor industry from Beijing, US President Barack Obama on Friday issued an executive order barring a Chinese deal to buy a German semiconductor company's California-based subsidiary, citing national security reasons.

The competing R&D alliance of Globalfoundries, Samsung Electronics and IBM announced a 7nm process technology, but it is taking a different approach. TSMC is using the current 193nm immersion lithography tools while the alliance's process relies on a new form of lithography, known as EUV or extreme ultra-violet, to pattern some critical layers.

Ever since Siemens announced its plan to acquire Mentor Graphics three weeks ago, many in the semiconductor industry have been poking and parsing its implications. They've found, thus far, more questions than answers.

Eight users have complained to Shanghai's consumer watchdog that their iPhone 6 series handsets spontaneously combusted or exploded. Apple said it had conducted tests on the devices and had found "no cause for concern with these products".

US President Barack Obama appeared to block a Chinese company from buying Germany's Aixtron SE, marking only the third time in more than a quarter century that the White House has rejected an overseas buyer as a national security risk.

Fresh blood and a little reorganizations might be the key for Intel to succeed in two hot new markets - IoT and automotive - that will be crucial for its hopes to reduce its reliance on PCs as the company's main growth generator.

Samsung Electronics said it will disclose plans to boost shareholder value on Tuesday - a move that comes amid pressure from US fund Elliott Management to split the company in two and provide more in payouts.

As Linley Gwennap, the head of the eponymous research firm Linley Group, sees it, the "16nm" technology of TSMC and the others "is really 19nm," and the planned 7nm "will be about 13nm relative to Intel processes." Intel, he concludes, is a "a full node" ahead of the foundries, "Just as they have been for the past decade."

Wells Fargo chip analyst David Wong this afternoon writes that the "chip recovery has begun," in particular for analog chip names, after quarterly reports from "a representative set of analog chip companies."

If you ask Anthony Yen, who leads EUV lithography development at TSMC, how critical EUV is to Moore's Law, he won't beat around the bush: "Totally critical. 100 percent critical. Very, very critical." TSMC expects to adopt EUV in 2020, when the company aims to begin producing chips on its 5-nm manufacturing line.

Qualcomm's X12 is capable of dealing with more channels of data simultaneously than its Intel rival, according to a report by Milan Milanovic, an analyst at Cellular Insights, which tests phones and networks. Apple didn't enable this feature "to level the playing field between Qualcomm and Intel," Milanovic wrote.

German chipmaker Infineon raised its medium-term profitability target on Wednesday, banking on strong growth in its automotive business as carmakers invest heavily on electric and self-driving vehicles.

China has become the first country to receive more than 1m patent applications in a single year - a record the World Intellectual Property Organisation said reflected "extraordinary" levels of innovation in the world's most populous nation.

Some insiders of the company are suggesting to reorganize the System LSI division in order to systematically grow the system semiconductor business. They are planning to separate the design and manufacturing sectors in the division and separate or spin off to fabless and foundry business divisions.

As of 2013, the 10 ASEAN nations had a total of over 700 million mobile subscriptions, with the CAGR from 2003-2013 reaching 24%. This Digitimes Research Special Report analyzes the various mobile broadband markets in ASEAN and looks at the respective trends in 4G LTE development for those markets.

This Digitimes Research Special Report analyzes the strategies of key China-based major panel makers BOE, Tianma and IVO for attacking the different market segments through technology and pricing, and their relationship to local vendors Huawei, Lenovo, ZTE, Xiaomi and Coolpad.